Read on Twitter
1/ Time for an apology and a correction. Seems that every newspaper in the UK is (correctly) reporting that I said the risk of catching a fatal case of Covid-19 is about the same as the risk of having a bath. I did say that, but I was wrong. Details below.
2/ What’s true is that for a typical 60 year old, running the sort of infection risks the current UK citizen is currently running, the chance of catching a fatal case of Covid-19 is currently about 1 in 2 million per day, perhaps a bit lower.
3/ Now according to this piece – the author of which should be held blameless – the risk of taking a bath is about 1 in 3 million (0.3 micromorts). But that can’t be right. https://theconversation.com/whats-most-likely-to-kill-you-measuring-how-deadly-our-daily-activities-are-72505
4/ The correct claim is that the risk of dying in the bath PER YEAR is 1 in 3 million – 20-30 deaths per year in a country of 67 million people. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/28/mortality-statistics-causes-death-england-wales-2010#external
5/ My piece in the Daily Mail got this right (and thanks to the Mail for fixing their headline absolutely at the last second). My original piece in the FT – amplified widely elsewhere – got it wrong. (Right about Covid, wrong about baths.) Again, I apologise.
6/ I hate making mistakes, but I do find mistakes interesting and try to learn lessons. So what happened here? I double and triple-checked my calculations about Covid risk. I showed my piece to three respected academics, who gave it a thumbs up. But then…
7/ …I realised it was in the one-in-a-million ballpark, per day. ‘One micromort’. So I looked at a couple of articles, by serious academics, listing other activities that were about a micromort: skiing, a trip on a motorbike, horse riding. Also: taking a bath. (Gah!)
8/ I put them all in the article and didn’t think much more about it – it was a tiny afterthought. The piece was about Covid, not baths.
9/ But of course my “Covid is like taking bath” error was amplified by the FT subhead and by other newspapers because it was so eye-catching. It was only when the Daily Mail told me that they, too, were going to put it in the headline that a little voice in my head whispered…
10/ ...are you SURE about that, Tim?
So now I feel like a Cautionary Tale in my own book – which has an entire chapter devoted to the filters in the media and academia that screen out some things and amplify others. https://timharford.com/books/worldaddup/
So now I feel like a Cautionary Tale in my own book – which has an entire chapter devoted to the filters in the media and academia that screen out some things and amplify others. https://timharford.com/books/worldaddup/
11/ As I write, “the ‘interestingness’ filter is tremendously powerful”. Too right. All too often false claims are amplified because they're so interesting and surprising. To my regret I have just produced an example.
12/ What else is interesting: nobody in the UK has emailed to correct me. The only two people to raise the alarm were a Spanish data journalist (thanks, sir) and my wife.
13/ Covid is a killer. It’s killed 65,000 people in the UK, including a dear friend of mine. Don’t let anyone tell you different. But the daily infection risk from Covid is now low. People shouldn’t be terrified to leave their own homes.
14/ There is still a risk. For a 60 year old, perhaps one in two million – more like riding or skiing than bathing. Much more worrying is the risk of a second wave - one infection leads to two, then four, then eight...
15/ So we need to be responsible, wash hands, avoid high-risk situations. But we also need to keep things in proportion.
16/ Once again, I am sorry to have got this wrong. As you can guess, getting things right – especially getting the numbers right – is important to me. I am embarrassed that my mistake was so widely repeated. Please, nobody tell @BBCMoreOrLess ...
